By Big Al Interesting commentary by George Will brought to my attention by Mr. Howe
A new paean to progressivism overlooks why Americans lost trust in government
BY GEORGE WILL Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON
Is there anything more depressing than a cheerful liberal? The question is prompted by one such, historian David Goldfield, who has written a largehearted book explaining that America’s problems would yield to government’s deft ameliorating touch if Americans would just rekindle their enthusiasm for it.
Goldfield’s new book, “The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good,” notes that in 1964 nearly 80 percent of Americans said they trusted Washington all or most of the time; today, about 20 percent do. Goldfield does not explain why trust in government waned as government’s confidence waxed. The question contains its answer.
He rightly celebrates the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights, but misses what distinguished it from many subsequent social programs.
It was intended as a measure against unemployment and political extremism among millions demobilized from the military. It worked. Veterans overwhelmed campuses; Goldfield says that some in California resided in fuselages of half-built airplanes.
Eligibility for the bill’s benefits was contingent upon having performed military service. The bill used liberal means – subsidies for veterans’ education and homebuying – to achieve conservative results: Rather than merely maintaining people as permanent wards of government, it created an educated, property-owning middle class equipped for self-reliant striving.
In contrast, much of the Great Society’s liberalism sought to de-moralize policies, deeming repressive those policies that promoted worthy behavior. This liberalism’s political base was in government’s caring professions that served “clients” in populations disorganized by behaviors involving sex and substance abuse. Surely this goes far toward explaining what Goldfield’s narrative leaves inexplicable:
Postwar America’s political process chose Harry Truman and then Dwight Eisenhower to preserve the post-New Deal status quo. And then it chose Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater, who was (rightly) viewed as hostile to the New Deal’s legacy. But just 16 years later, the electorate, whose prior preferences Goldfield approves, made an emphatic choice that he considers a sudden eruption of dark impulses that hitherto were dormant. Goldfield does not distinguish, as Ronald Reagan did, between New Deal liberalism – of which the G.I. Bill was a culmination – and liberalism’s subsequent swerve in another direction. And he has no answer as to why the electorate, so receptive for so long to hyperactive government, by 1980 was not.
Goldfield flecks his narrative with fascinating facts: Not until 1943 did the government remove the racial classification “Hebrew” from immigration forms. Cornell University’s president promised to prevent Jewish enrollment from making the school “unpleasant for first-class Gentile students.” When Jonas Salk, who would invent the polio vaccine, applied for a fellowship, one of his recommenders wrote, “Dr. Salk is a member of the Jewish race but has, I believe, a very great capacity to get on with people.” That we cringe is a better metric of social progress than is government spending on social programs.
Goldfield’s grasp of contemporary America can be gauged by his regret that the …read more
Source:: The Korelin Economics Report
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